Friday, October 12, 2007

Solar From Space?

This takes me back to my days as a young hippy reading the Mother Earth News' special technology features, because similar plans have been touted as enviro-cure-alls for at least 30 years. The idea is you build a huge (1 kilometre wide) platform of solar panels in geosynchronous orbit, have it collect solar energy, and then beam this to the ground in the form of microwaves.

The main problem is cost, which will run into the 10s of billions, although that is not nearly as hefty a sum as the cost of some of the wilder geo-engineering proposals now under discussion. One apparent non-issue is the problem of accidentally incinerating anything that gets too close to the vast field of microwave collectors you need at ground level:

The peak density of the beam is likely to be significantly less than noon sunlight,and at the edge of the rectenna equivalent to the leakage allowed and accepted byhundreds of millions in their microwave ovens. This low energy density and choice of wavelength also means that biological effects are likely extremely small, comparable to the heating one might feel if sitting some distance from a campfire.

16 comments:

Al Gore lied and got really, really rich
said...

meanwhile, in other news about the silly notion that mankind controls climate

As media in America fall all over themselves with glee at the thought of the Global Warmingist-in-Chief winning a Nobel Peace Prize, Wednesday's findings by a British judge that Al Gore's film "An Inconvenient Truth" contained nine material falsehoods has prompted a request to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to strip the movie's producers of the Oscars they received in February for "Best Documentary."

That's a great idea. We should immediately cut all funding to social services, arts, CBC, and every other bleeding heart victim science organization and redirect it to SAVING THE PLANET! Who could possibly complain about that?